rob mclennan: from 'the green notebook'
Michael Boughn, from Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (2024): “Stan Persky, in a recent conversation, suggested to me that the first step in teaching poetry is to explain to students how poetry is a ‘linguistic mode of knowledge,’ comparable to narrative or mathematics. A mode of knowledge, or, say, thinking, is like what I just called a register.”
We’ve landed in Picton for a few days, with father-in-law and his wife. Already the young ladies are in the pool, and I am poolside, attempting to catch my bearings, breath. How else best to attempt that than through essays on The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960)?
There is a conversation I’ve had with a contemporary or two over the past couple of years about some of these emerging poets: how composition seems less about form than about storytelling. The stories might be complex, but the writing itself is not, often rendering even the most compelling narratives a kind of flatness. Is this the moment that I feel myself age? I regularly attempt to respond to the younger writers without sounding like an old fogey. Have the purposes and functions of writing itself simply evolved beyond me?
A description from Boughn that holds deep resonance with my thinking: “Meaning is not a sum to be arrived at, but an ongoing engagement unfolding in the poet’s language.”
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“Epilogue. Words said after words.” Susan Thackrey, “Epilogue,” from Susan Gevirtz’s Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (2010).
There is the writing prior, and what might follow: the writing. About what this is, back and forth and all of the above.
Poolside, Picton. A spider already begins to work its web from the end of this pen. Seriously.
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Picton Bay: a Caspian Tern loops and dives into the surface of the water.
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I’m sitting in the lobby of Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara Falls, with broken foot, as the young ladies and accompanying nephew run their escapades, their quests. They introduce to nephew what they saw last year, when we were through. They move across floors, as Christine and her mother confirm our room keys. Three days, two nights. While here, the children aim to run around the activities, the waterpark; they run around the room. Our two young ladies, as they run around.
I’m appreciating Michael Boughn’s essays on Robert Duncan, wondering if he might be allowing me that further inch to a further inch into knowing how to read Duncan. An entry point, perhaps. “Occult histories, occult teachings, occult memories, occult mind, occult inheritances, occult language, and above all, occult meanings—Robert Duncan unfolded them all in The H.D. Book in a proliferating, symphonic performance of, as he puts it in a letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, thinking as orgasm, thinking as an explosive release linked to Eros, rather than the traditional notion of a displaced exposition. Logos, with footnotes and citations. The importance of hiddenness itself unfolded along with them, orchestrated into a weave of shadow and light—in corners and at the far edges of the mind, where a certain kind of light or enlightenment cannot, or at least will not, reach, playing itself out in shadows dancing.”
Any notion of the occult, admittedly, presents to me a red flag. I hold a fiery resistance to such abstract thinking. Is this my lack of imagination showing?
After N35, the bingo caller declares, we’re looking for N43. Two dozen families on the carpeted floor, cross-legged.
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Rain, on the balcony, or at least the covered stoop outside our hotel room sliding door, just below ground level, ground. “An omnipresent struggle with objectivity,” Cassidy McFadzean writes, near the end of the poem “SEVERANCE” from her Crying Dress (2024), “Putting on last winter’s coat to find // the gloves that, missing all this time, no longer fit [.]”
During our week away from home, I work two sides of the compositional array: directly into my notebook, sketching thoughts, ideas and first-draft scraps, and scribbling edits on manuscript pages, line my satchel with file folders, including my current short story manuscript-in-progress, “Very suddenly all at once: stories,” (with a deliberate comma at the end, given everything we do and write and say is ongoing, until that moment it becomes no longer).
Last year, our main floor room sat the length of the building away on the same side we’re on now, and both nights as the local skunk meandered past, as we sat in the dark, our young ladies inside, settling into sleep. Today, the irony of attempting to remain dry during a heavy rain, sitting outside the water park. I suppose, like anything, one needs to be dressed for the occasion.
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Andy Weaver wakes me with a text from London, England, as he wanders a few days following a conference he attended: “A morning reading and writing in Bloomsbury Square Gardens.”
6:35am, Ontario time. Dude, too early.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
